Prompt VA benefits plummet under Obama

“They have a lot more detailed information than we were led to believe,” said Ryan Hassanein, a partner at Morrison & Foerster, the law firm that represented the veterans.

Lawmakers who have been working on the issue said they hadn’t seen the documents before.

Rep. Mike Thompson, a California Democrat and Vietnam veteran, joined other members of the Northern California delegation to meet with senior VA officials Feb. 27 to discuss the issue. He said VA officials have told him they are making slow but steady progress.

“I’m not going to be an apologist for the president or for the VA,” Thompson said, “but this was a long festering mess when they came in. I think they have made improvements.”

The VA’s internal documents tell a different story.

Since 2009, the number of Southern California veterans waiting more than a year for their benefits has increased from 262 to 21,567. The average wait time for San Diego veterans has increased from 102 to 276 days, while the typical delay for Los Angeles veterans has spiked from 109 to 431 days.

More than 3,000 Southern California veterans have been waiting more than two years for their benefits.

The documents obtained by the Center for Investigative Reporting shed light on why the agency is failing to make headway despite public and political pressure and its own promises.

They show that while the agency has spent four years and $537 million on a new computer system, 97 percent of all veterans’ claims remain on paper. Since those numbers were tallied by the agency in January, the VA’s two top technology officers have announced their resignations, saying they had accomplished their goals.

On Feb. 27, the agency’s principal deputy undersecretary for benefits also announced he was quitting.

In interviews, workers at five VA offices said they were exhausted by the ever-growing piles of paperwork, with files becoming so thick that employees frequently have asked veterans to resend medical records or military service documents simply because the claims workers could not locate them.

Cindy Indof, who handles appeals at the VA office in Columbia, S.C., said it is not uncommon for her to see the same medical information in a veteran’s claim repeated two or even three times. The growth in paperwork, she said, is compounded by a points system that gives performance bonuses to workers for sending letters to veterans but not for spending extra time reading a claims file.

Taylor, the VA spokesman, said the computer system would be launched at all regional offices by the end of the year. “The transition is under way. We’re at the midpoint. We’re not at the endpoint yet,” he said.

The agency’s public pronouncements about hiring 3,300 additional claim processors since 2010 to cope with the influx of returning Iraq and Afghanistan veterans also were misleading, the documents show.

Because of turnover and the loss of more than 2,000 workers temporarily paid through stimulus funds, staffing at the VA’s 58 regional offices actually has increased by fewer than 300 people since September 2010 – even as the volume of new claims increased dramatically.